Inside Apple's 2011: Steve Jobs' achievements, battles and crises

The next day after his early June WWDC appearance, Jobs made a third appearance at the Cupertino City Council to outline his plans for Apple Campus 2, a project to convert HP's abandoned Pruneridge campus into a tree covered green space surrounding a circular building larger than the Pentagon, capable of housing more than 12,000 workers.

Apple loses Steve Jobs, continues his vision

While Apple's most blockbuster year ever, in 2011 the company lost its co-founder at the peak of his accomplishments. Just two weeks after Apple surpassed the market capitalization of Exxon Mobil to become the most valuable public company, Jobs announced he could "no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apples CEO," and recommended that Tim Cook serve as his replacement.

Jobs continued to sit on Apple's board as Chairman until October 5, when the company announced Jobs had passed away, just one day after announcing his final product to see released at Apple, the iPhone 4S packing the Siri technology he had presided over the development of through the past year.

Two as yet unreleased projects Jobs also oversaw that have not yet been fully released as products involve two other acquisitions Apple made in 2011. The first, C3 Technologies of Sweden, is a 3D mapping company Apple acquired in August, and the third map-related firm the company has bought up recently.

In 2009, Apple purchased Placebase, a Google Maps competitor, sparking speculation that it was looking to decrease its dependance on Google technology for the Maps application on the iPhone. Last year, it acquired Web-based map company Poly 9, which had developed a "cross-browser, cross-platform 3D globe" product. Apple also began using its own databases for location-based services, and posted positions throughout the year looking for applicants to help "radically improve how people interact with maps and location-based services."

A second major acquisition by Apple was finalized in December, involving Israeli firm Anobit. While involving the company's "Memory Signal Processing" technology for optimizing the reliability, performance, efficiency and endurance of flash memory, the purchase appears to dovetail into a series of acquisitions Apple has made in the past half decade involving chip design, including Intrinsity in 2010 and P.A. Semi in 2008. Those acquisitions appear to have contributed to the development of Apple's A5, which were used to power this year's iPad 2 and iPhone 4S.

Apple under Tim Cook

Apple continues under Cook, who Jobs recommended as chief executive after serving Apple for 13 years as its chief operations officer. Cook turned around the company's operational mess and turned Apple into a brutally competitive machine, making key, billion dollar investments in components and technologies. Cook's deft handling of Apple's operations, while also managing portions of Jobs' executive role throughout the year as his health worsened, enabled Apple to weather such storms as the earthquakes and tsunamis that devastated Japan and shut down key component manufacturing there.

Cook also managed Apple's operations through flooding in Thailand that disrupted the manufacture of hard drives (although many of Apple's key products now use sold state memory rather than conventional disks) and targeted the handling of regional crises such as Hurricane Irene, which shut down retail stores on the East Coast.

Cook's Apple itself has disrupted the global market, shifting demand away from disk drives and DRAM and toward NAND flash memory while features such as the company's aluminum unibody designs have left "Ultrabook" competitors incapable of delivering competitive products.

A report by the Wall Street Journal described Cook as molding Apple with a more streamlined operating structure with improved internal communication, and Cook has expressed a strong regard for the principles of supplier responsibility in labor and human rights, health and safety, the environment, ethics, and management commitment among the companies Apple does business with, promising to perpetuate the culture Jobs instilled in the company he crafted.

Corrections,
Android 3.0 source code was released in mid-November, not quite making closed access for "the entire year".

Not so much a correction as you being pedantic. I suppose if it Honeycomb was still locked today you'd say that we can't be sure it was locked for "the entire year" because we don't know if Google would open up before new year hits.

edit: Personally, I would have been more precise but that's just the way I roll*.

Not so much a correction as you being pedantic. I suppose if it Honeycomb was still locked today you'd say that we can't be sure it was locked for "the entire year" because we don't know if Google would open up before new year hits.

Since it isn't then it's of no matter guessing then. We all have our pedantic moments I guess.

If it wasn't one of his favorite clubs to use in talking points I probably wouldn't have bothered mentioning it. I have no idea why a discussion of whether Google is open or not was included in the first place or in any way pertinent to the article. Wasn't it supposed to be about Apple in 2011 and Steve Jobs accomplishments and crises?

I have enjoyed this last 10 years. Living through a period of faster than usual innovation.

But it was Steve that did that. Committees fumble along, and do advance, but it is individuals with a spark that pick up the pace.

It is the American Peoples' love of individual achievement that allows them to maintain a faster pace than other countries, but they seem willing to throw the individual to the lions these days. e.g. if the group needs healthcare then the individual be damned.

I have been an Apple fan for a long time, but I wonder if I was really a Steve fan all along? If a new startup with a similar genius comes along, will I switch allegiances?

Since it isn't then it's of no matter guessing then. We all have our pedantic moments I guess.

If it wasn't one of his favorite clubs to use in talking points I probably wouldn't have bothered mentioning it. I have no idea why a discussion of whether Google is open or not was included in the first place or in any way pertinent to the article. Wasn't it supposed to be about Apple in 2011 and Steve Jobs accomplishments and crises?

Did a google search of AI, and I couldn't find any mention of DED pointing that out before. Perhaps you can cite where he's used this "favorite club"?

Also, the discussion of Google being "open or not" was based on WHAT STEVE JOBS SAID. Also, one can't list Jobs' accomplishments & battles for 2011 without addressing Android, where Google tried to take it, and how it failed.

And since this is 2011 and not 2010, DED is addressing Honeycomb more than Google TV!